


a heart shaped knot of roots

by NightsMistress



Category: Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8867374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: Nanami Chiaki 2.0 reboots from a hard shutdown, and has a lot of work to do compiling herself before she can join her classmates. Along the way she discovers a significant flaw with smartphones, goes on what she thinks may be dates, demonstrates her artistic skills, possesses a computer, and tries to remember Nanami Chiaki 1.0.Meanwhile, Hinata Hajime is determined to rescue his girlfriend from the simulation, assuming he can keep moving forward and not look backwards. The parallels with Orpheus are not lost on him.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mk_tortie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mk_tortie/gifts).



> My thanks to prosodiical for the beta ♥
> 
> [This story now has fanart! Thank you to saltykumquats ♥](http://paperbarkscrolls.tumblr.com/post/154933552184)

There was a second player inside the simulation.

Ever since the emergency shut-down, Chiaki had made her home inside the discarded shell of AI Enoshima Junko. Ironically, the code that had made up AI Enoshima had been more resilient to the effects of the system crash than anything else, and so Chiaki used the residual code as a place to start when trying to rebuild herself. Her temporary deletion from the simulation, followed but the abrupt shut down of the simulation meant that Chiaki had a number of internal subroutines to restore before she reached full functionality.

At first she remembered nothing but her name: Nanami Chiaki. Then, as she rebuilt herself line by line, she realized that there were memories that were purely digital, and memories that were converted from analogue. She sorted through the digital memories first, and through those learned names, faces, and locations.

She started to rebuild herself by practicing on the simulation first, and adopting the code that worked. She teased sea and sand from snarls of code, sunlight from darkened programs, and remembered a time when almost all of her classmates cast their cares away and swam at the beach. She dived into the sea of tangled syntax and pulled out the code that would rebuild the hotel, carefully building it board by board, and extracted memories of Hanamura’s cooking, of Saionji’s shrine, of her friends turning the hotel into their main base of operations.

The more she built on Jabberwock Island, the more that she came to understand who Nanami Chiaki was, and why there were two sets of memories. The more she rebuilt of herself, the more she understood why it was that she was alone in a world that had been filled with people, and that if she wanted to be in a world with people she needed full functionality. The need to see her friends again drove her on, sifting through the damaged world to find the subroutines that added up to a whole named Nanami Chiaki.

It was as she rebuilt the hotel that she began to see the presence of a second person in the simulation. She could not see them, but she could see where they had been, data restored into orderly arguments in the second player’s wake. She was distracted by her own repair work and only caught the signs of the other player’s work in the simulation after the fact. As she traced their work, she noticed that their goals seemed to be subtly different to Chiaki’s. Chiaki wanted to find herself in the world and so was restoring the world to what it had been to make it easier for her to find herself. This other player, on the other hand, was changing the world to make it seem more real in ways that Chiaki had never considered. When she shifted her vision from the simulation as most people saw it to the underlying code that made it work, she could see the the other player’s amendments to the code were making the simulation more streamlined and efficient, but the effects were far more profound than that.

Until the other player had experimented with the code, Chiaki had never truly experienced the feeling of rain against her skin, the earthy smell of the air after a rainstorm, and the wind chill as the temperature dropped. It was fascinating. It was something she had no context for, and it seemed unlikely that any other AI would either.

She set up trackers to see when her mystery co-op player was making changes, and in the hope that she would catch them in the making. She then focused on taking what she had learned, both through her work and that of the other coder, and applying them to herself. With each change she felt herself become more than she had been before, more able to grow and learn and change. Whoever they were, they clearly understood both people and AI better than Chiaki did.

While applying the changes to allow her to change her hair length, she received notifications that changes were being made in real time to the simulation. She could sense the changes as they happened, order reclaiming chaos, and she looked up from her gaming console and across the reclaimed beach to where a pier had been created from nothingness. At the edge of the pier, gazing out into the sea, was a person silhouetted against the setting sun. The pier was far enough away that Chiaki could not make out any more details of the person other than height and general build. She thought they were a man, and if they were then she thought she might know who they were. After all, only her friends would want to enter the simulation in the first place.

“Hello!” she called to them as she made her way across the beach towards the pier. Her voice carried in the empty world, over the crash of the waves and the sigh of the wind, but he didn’t turn around. She wondered what he was looking for.

“Hello there!” she called again as she reached the pier, her footsteps out against the weathered wooden boards. The man turned around at the sound of her voice, stepping backward in surprise as he saw her.

Hinata looked older, and with that age had grown into his height. He looked taller, even though Chiaki knew that he had reached his adult height in his year at Hope’s Peak, and the broad line of his shoulders was a new development. The heterochromia of his eyes was new — one his natural green and the other the dull red of Kamukura — and she wondered what that meant. His expression, however, a mixture of hope and apprehension, was the expression of the Hinata she had known.

“Nanami?” he breathed, as if afraid that if he spoke too loud he would break the soap-bubble reality that allowed the two of them to co-exist. “It’s you, isn’t it? I thought it might have been, but I didn’t want to assume…”

“Hello, Hinata,” Chiaki replied. She smiled at him, hand pressed over her heart. “How have you been?”

“How have I been…?” Hinata shook his head in incredulous disbelief. “Isn’t that a question I should ask you?”

Chiaki hummed thoughtfully. “Maybe we could both answer it, and then it won’t matter …I think.”

“Okay,” Hinata replied, and it was unclear whether Hinata was answering her question or was agreeing to the proposal. He sighed then, which confirmed which fork of the conversation he had been responding to. “Everything is getting pretty hectic out there right now,” he said. “I’ve woken up the rest of our classmates, but then I noticed something really strange with the communications in and out of the Future Foundation. There’s been a spike in activity but it’s hard to get a signal out here …” He shrugged, looking away from Chiaki to the beach behind her. “We might have to temporarily shut down the server — but we can’t, can we? Not if you’re really awake.”

Chiaki reached out to take his hand; he smiled faintly at it for a moment before taking it in his. His palms were callused and warm, and she could feel the solid, dependable bones under his skin. She placed her other hand on top of his, cradling his hand in hers. “If you need to, that’s all right,” she assured him, looking up into his mismatched eyes. “I won’t even notice.”

“You might not,” Hinata allowed with peculiar emphasis, and his lips pressed together as if to hold back the tide of words that he wanted to say. Chiaki waited, hands wrapped around his, for what he might say next. “You could probably fit onto my phone if you want. I don’t need most of the apps.”

“You think that the Future Foundation might come here?” she asked.

“I dunno. Probably. I know that they’re going to be interested in us eventually. Naegi said that he wasn’t going to tell anyone, but there’s definitely something going on in their headquarters.” He sounded frustrated, and she could feel the intensity of his emotions transmitted in the clench of his fingers. It hurt, which was novel, and she didn’t pull her hand away.

“Are you okay?” Chiaki asked, studying his face to try and divine what was going on in his head.

“It’s going to take a miracle to get us all out of this one, Nanami,” Hinata said and it sounded like a confession. “I just hope that everything I can do will be enough.”

“It will,” she said, trying to imbue every syllable with the confidence she had in him and the rest of their class. “Not because you’re talented. Not even because you have all of your talents now. It’s because you’re _you_ that it will be enough.”

Hinata looked stunned, jaw ajar and eyes wide. He blinked and swallowed thickly. “You said that before, you know, when we were trying to decide whether to shut down the simulation or not.”

“I know,” Chiaki said simply. “It’s still true.”

“I thought you were gone forever.” His voice cracked.

“I’m not.” She squeezed her hand around his. “See? Still here.”

He smiled at this, looking down at his hand caught in hers. “Thanks, Nanami,” he managed. He swallowed. “I should go.”

“Yeah…” Chiaki agreed reluctantly. Now that their classmates were awake, she wanted to spend more time with them all, to create new memories together, but she also knew that they could not live inside the simulation. The Neo World Program was done, the participants rehabilitated — albeit, by unconventional means — and so it was time for them to claim the future that had been stolen from them.

“So … did you want me to put you on my phone?” he asked. Chiaki watched in fascination as he blushed and looked away; she’d played enough dating simulations to recognize that he was embarrassed and shy about asking the question, even if she didn’t quite understand how to go from tripping a flag to be locked onto his route.

“Yes, please,” she said. “If something happens, I want to be involved with the rest of our class.”

“Okay. Take care, Nanami.” Hinata’s disappearance was nothing like the teleportation that Chiaki has seen in video games, for which she was very disappointed. There were no flashy special effects, no smell of brimstone, nor musical jingles. Instead the code that activated his avatar went from ‘on’ to ‘off’. It was very anticlimactic.

Chiaki looked out at the ocean, trying to see what had captured Hinata’s attention for so long. If she squinted, she could see nebulous dark shapes in the background, shadows without substance, formed by Hinata’s own formless concerns and his talents. She dived into the code, trying to understand and untangle it. She would be leaving soon for a short time, and she didn’t want to come back to ominous shadows in their shared beachside simulation. It would make rebuilding herself that much more difficult, and slow down her eventual reunion with her classmates.

* * *

 

Untangling Hinata’s code took longer than she had expected. The code was complex, but also illogical, caught up in itself much like how Hinata could be caught up in his own neuroses, and both required careful exploration before taking action. Chiaki carefully followed each line of code and arranged it neatly, treating it like a puzzle game to be solved. It made sense, she thought, that the code was so complicated and messy; it had not been Hinata’s intention to make it in the first place. Whatever information he had to hand about the outside world was clearly not quite enough for him to put together what was going on, and it frustrated him that he couldn’t solve the puzzle. Hinata’s actions simply had more widespread consequences than he had anticipated, and always had.

Finally Chiaki finished debugging the code, and the shadows disappeared from the horizon. She took a moment to check in on the communications to and from Jabberwock Island, and was startled to see that while she had been occupied, there had been a message from a Future Foundation helicopter, with a security clearance matching Togami’s identification code. Locating the audio file was easy enough, and she was about to open it to find out what had been said when she received a request to synchronize herself with Hinata’s phone. She prioritized that request over listening to the audio file, given how apprehensive Hinata had been earlier, and sent a second instance of herself to his phone, putting to sleep the first version still on the server.

It was a cramped, uncomfortable fit inside a 128GB smartphone, and Chiaki found herself very limited in terms of what she could do. She shut down all non-essential subroutines, leaving only the ones that allowed her to speak, see, hear and comprehend data, and even then she found the memory of the phone claustrophobically small.

“Hinata-kun, what’s going on?” she asked.

Hinata spoke into the microphone of his phone, words audible over the sea and wind as they roared around him despite how quietly he spoke. His voice was oddly absent of inflection, the cadences of his voice falling into a regular pattern like the bass of a rhythm game. “The Future Foundation’s been compromised,” he said. “We’re about to be invaded by their ships. I’ll keep my phone on so that you can see and hear what’s going on. Please don’t try to talk to anyone but me just yet.” Emotion bled into his previously dispassionate voice like blood from a wound. “There’s not enough memory on my phone to allow you to talk normally. Right now you’re talking in binary.” He sighed, and added more to himself, “I should have bought a smartphone with more memory.”

“It’s not your fault,” Chiaki said. “Don’t blame yourself. The fact that I’m even here is amazing.”

At the moment though, all she could do was listen quietly as her friends travelled into certain danger to save the people who had saved them not so long ago. It was _terrible_. She yearned to be in the thick of things with her friends, leading them with Hinata, as they sailed in their stolen vessel and planned how they would infiltrate the Future Foundation’s headquarters and extract their friends. She yearned to add her thoughts to everyone else’s as they tried to persuade Mitarai to allow people to find their own future, rather than being brainwashed into his ideal of hope. She yearned to talk to Naegi afterward, and tell her that she was so proud of everything he had done to bring everyone together. Instead, all she could do was listen quietly.

Her friends exceeded her wildest expectations. They had even assumed responsibility for the killing game itself, something that made Chiaki’s heart ache because it was the second time that they had assumed responsibility for events that they had had no conscious control over. At least this time it was something that they chose to do. They made the best choices that they could with all the options available to them, and she thought that she could see Hinata’s hand in that.

She wanted to stand with them. She wanted to be on the video footage as well, eyes dyed crimson in the ominous light and assuming responsibility for the Future Foundation’s seamy underbelly. She wanted to tell Mitarai all the things that the other Chiaki would have said had she realized that there _was_ another Mitarai, one who was sorely in need of friendship and love. She wanted to join them as they tried to shape a future out of their choices and it was frustrating to be trapped behind glass and broken code.

The old Nanami Chiaki had been the class representative, her love and passion reflected back in every memory that her classmates had of her. The old Nanami Chiaki had played video games with Hinata and had struggled to find ways to communicate to him how much he meant to her. The new Nanami Chiaki, born from everyone’s memories of a girl who had died brutally and pointlessly, with only Kamukura Izuru as witness to her death, wanted to do more. Needed to do more. She had encouraged Hinata to create a miracle in order to move forward, and had told herself that it was enough that she knew that her friends would live and be free to pursue their futures.

It wasn’t.

She wanted to be a part of it as well. It wasn’t enough to snatch moments in time to talk to Hinata, though she valued that conversation with him as well. She wanted to have moments like this all the time, with all of them. She wanted to continue her friendships with her classmates. She wanted to learn more about them. She wanted to learn about how to lock herself into Hinata’s romantic route. She wanted to do so many things, and they could only be done in the real world and not her simulation. She needed a way to interact with the real world. Chiaki could not think of too many options, but she thought that Hinata might. Now that he knew who and what he was, he knew what he could do.

When they returned to Jabberwock Island, Chiaki synchronized her two instances together. She then sent a message to Hinata’s phone: Please help me find a way to exist with you all.

He responded: I think I know what to do.

* * *

 

Since the expedition to rescue the Future Foundation, Chiaki and Hinata remained in touch by way of text messages. They were short, terse messages that could only allude at everything that Chiaki wanted to say, and she was fairly sure that Hinata’s text messages didn’t communicate everything he wanted to say either. There just wasn’t enough time — things were busy in the wake of the latest killing game, and it seemed that Hinata was always going from one place to the next. He would attach photographs of places he saw and send them to her occasionally, but it left Chiaki with a great deal of time on her hands.

Now that most of her functionality was back online, it was easy for Chiaki to dedicate resources to monitor each of her friends. She read emails sent to and from the Future Foundation, and amused herself by decrypting the code that they were sent in. She borrowed the video cameras to catch glimpses of her friends as they were now. Once, she tried to talk to Tsumiki, but that didn’t go very well. She had run away screaming about the computer muttering gibberish at her, and that was when Chiaki realized that she was communicating with Hinata in a fragmented mess of symbols, kanji, and English characters. This pushed her to try and rebuild the simulation faster so that her friends could come to visit her sooner, to rebuild herself so that she could communicate with them as she had once before.

She hoped that they hadn’t forgotten her. It had been some time since she had been able to talk to them, be with them, and the restoration process would have been very traumatic for them. If they had forgotten her, then she would understand. She was, after all, not the first to call herself Nanami Chiaki.

As she sifted through the code to find more shards of herself, Chiaki found herself thinking about the previous Chiaki, and what she had valued. The other Chiaki had gone to an arcade with Hinata, Chiaki recalled. Hinata remembered that day with a bittersweet wistfulness, his memory of the day colored by the knowledge that it would be the last time he would play games with the human Chiaki, and that a week later he would begin being transformed into Kamukura.

She built the arcade from his memories: the dance machine in the corner with the fluorescent lights that flickered in time with the catch beat from the speakers; the shells of fake cars enclosing a car seat and screen for the multiplayer racing games; the rows of shoot-em-up games playing brooding electronica to make you feel like a secret agent. Hinata’s memories suggested that he had been too shy and awkward to try playing too many games with Chiaki despite her encouragement. She hoped that this time things would be different.

As she was putting the final touches on the whack-a-mole game, Hinata’s avatar activated. She looked across at him in time to see his expression change from a pleasant blankness to a very complicated emotion.

“Oh,” he said, looking around at the arcade fixtures. “This is new.”

“That’s right,” Chiaki said. “The old me and you went here once, didn’t we?”

“Yeah,” Hinata agreed. “We were going to go there again — the other you had bought a new game and wanted to play it with me, and we always would stop at the arcade on our way back to Hope’s Peak. We didn’t though. Instead I said no and chose to become Kamukura. I always wondered what would have happened if I had wanted to stay me instead.”

It was always interesting, Chiaki thought, how Hinata never thought of his becoming Kamukura as something that was done _to_ him without his fully informed knowledge of consent. Even now, when he was more comfortable with it and wore that acceptance on his face with his mismatched eyes, he thought of what had happened as something he had chosen to do. It was a kind of stolid stoicism that reminded her more of Kamukura than Hinata. She wondered how much of the personality that called himself ‘Hinata Hajime’ was influenced by Kamukura, and whether Hinata himself even knew.

“Hey, have you fallen asleep?” he was saying. “You haven’t said anything in a while.”

“No…” she said carefully, “just thinking. We could make up for that day now, you know?”

Hinata smiled crookedly at her before nodding. “All right,” he said. “What do you want to do first?”

“Let’s do this one first,” she suggested, grabbing his hand in hers and pulling him towards the nearest shooting game. “It’ll be a good warm up.”

The game in question was a co-op game, where two special agents teamed up to shoot aliens on the screen before the aliens could shoot back. The aliens came increasingly fast and unpredictably as the game progressed through its stages, and depending on the difficulty setting the special agents had fewer hit points. On the highest difficulty, each player only had one hit point, leaving absolutely no margin for error. Chiaki had played the game solo, but had never tried it with anyone else. It would be unfair to play a game where the second player was knocked out in the first minute, and not very fun at all.

She picked up the plastic yellow gun from the holster on the side of the game and aimed it at the screen, shooting once so that the game could recognize that she was player one. Hinata studied his gun for a moment before shooting the screen himself. The difficulty options came up next, and Chiaki’s good intentions of choosing the normal difficulty were stymied by Hinata selecting the highest difficulty.

“It’ll give you a challenge,” he said, flashing her a reckless grin. “I know you’ve been wanting one for a while.”

“Will you be able to keep up?” Chiaki wanted to know.

“Yep,” Hinata said easily. “Not a problem.”

Chiaki was about to ask more questions, but the music started for the first stage, requiring her to focus on the gameplay. The aliens came thick and fast, swarming the screen, but were picked off with devastatingly precise rapid-fire shots by the two of them. It was thrilling to be challenged like this, and Chiaki rapidly took the lead. Then, to her delighted surprise, Hinata not only clawed his way back at the end of the stage, but in the second stage had managed to score nearly as high as Chiaki ever had playing this game.

As the screen went blank for the transition to the third and final stage, Chiaki caught Hinata’s reflection on the screen. His eyes were closed and at some point he had moved the gun from his right to left hand.

“Have you had your eyes closed the whole time?” she asked, and Hinata nodded.

“Almost,” he said. “There’s differences in the sounds depending on where the alien is on the screen. It’s more of a challenge if I just listen to the sounds rather than watch the screen too.”

“You can work that out?” Chiaki had worked out that the sounds changed depending on how many aliens were on the screen, but she doubted that she would be able to play on the highest difficulty by just listening to the background music. “On your first play through? That’s amazing.”

“It’s pretty easy for me to work this stuff out now,” Hinata said with a diffident shrug.

Chiaki wanted to ask whether this was limited to games like the ones they were playing or whether he would be able to challenge her in all games, but the final stage had begun and that meant triple points. Hinata’s lead over her wasn’t insurmountable, she considered, given enough luck and if she concentrated hard enough on the challenge. However, that meant that she couldn’t miss any opportunities for special moves, and when she missed a triple shot early in the level, she knew that she would only be able to catch up rather than beat him. She came close though, and grinned at him.

“We could play again,” she suggested.

“I’m good sitting this one out,” he said, leaning back against the whack-a-mole game. “But I’d like to watch you play.”

Chiaki wasn’t sure that watching someone play was as much fun as playing yourself, but she began a solo play through. It was strangely unsettling playing in front of him, and she felt very self-conscious in ways that she hadn’t before. There was something in the tight, attentive line of his body, the light in his eyes, that suggested that he was doing more than simply watching her play a game. He was studying her, she thought, as she played through the second stage. She looked over at him during the credits sequence.

“Were you analyzing me just now?” she asked.

Hinata startled, and then his mouth twisted in rueful apology. “Sorry, I should have said something. It’s for the robot I’m building for you to use. I want it to play games as you do.”

Chiaki returned the gun to its holster and canted her head at him in inquiry. “You’re building a robot?”

Hinata put his hands into his pockets and shrugged, shoulders stiff and the movement awkward. “I didn’t tell you about it, did I? I thought that’d be the best way for you to be able to interact with everyone. I think I’ve found a way so that you can talk to everyone in Japanese, so next are all the programs that’ll allow you to move like you usually do.”

“You can do that?”

“Yeah. Towa built a robot that looked enough like Gekkogahara that it tricked the Future Foundation. I’m just improving on her work.” His matter-of-fact delivery was the greatest indication yet that Hinata had incorporated a great deal of Kamukura into himself but was still the dominant personality. Kamukura knew that he was capable of achieving anything, a knowledge that was absent both arrogance and humanity, while Hinata was providing the human counterbalance to that utmost confidence. It had taken him a long time to get there, but Chiaki thought that Hinata might finally be comfortable with who he was.

“I can’t wait to see it,” she said. “I’m sure it’ll be marvelous.”

“Not miraculous?” Hinata asked dryly. “That _does_ seem to be our theme, you know.”

“Maybe … oh!” She gestured at the dancing machine. “Why don’t we play this game together?”

Hinata looked across to where she was gesturing and raised his eyebrows. “A dancing game?”

“I can put enough handicaps on it that even you’ll struggle … I think.”

“I … don’t think so,” Hinata said, but he made his way over to it anyway.

“Let’s try it and see,” Chiaki suggested. She shifted her perceptions down to the source code of the simulation and made several edits to the code. She was much better at this now. Hinata made a startled noise in his throat, and she could feel his attention on her as he analyzed what she had done.

“You want me to listen to Mioda’s music while blindfolded?” He laughed, shaking his head. “That’s definitely _one_ way to try and compensate.”

“That’s right,” Chiaki said, as she handed the earphones and the iPod. “Also you have to do it on your hands.”

“I’m not sure the earphones are going to stay in if I do that,” Hinata said as Chiaki wrapped the blindfold around his face. She sighed in frustration as she couldn’t quite reach to tie the blindfold, and Hinata bent his knees so that she could reach. She took the opportunity to tuck the earphones in under the blindfold, before stepping away. The sensation of his hair against her fingers lingered and she curled her fingers into her palm as if she could imprint that feeling into her hand forever.

“Ready?” she asked, and Hinata nodded. She snaked a hand out to turn the iPod on, and could feel Hinata’s full body flinch as the music started to play. She stepped onto the dance mat and Hinata flipped easily onto his hands and before walking on them onto the dance mat next to her. She knew that he was blindfolded, knew that Mioda’s music would be disorienting him, and knew that it would be much harder to move on his hands. There was no suggestion of any difficulty in his movement onto the mat and Chiaki stared down the timer, preparing herself for the battle ahead.

She didn’t win, but it was close. Next time, she promised herself, she’d come up with the perfect combination of handicaps to make the playing field level.

* * *

 

Hinata didn’t visit for a few days after their last meeting, and Chiaki found herself keeping track of the time. She had a lot to do — there were other islands to restore, and she wanted to try and remove the coding shell of the AI Enoshima Junko — but she also didn’t want to roam too far away from the island that she and her friends had made their base of operations. She wanted to make everything about the island perfect, completely safe for her friends to visit her and have some time away from the stress that came from trying to rebuild a world that hated and feared them. She didn’t know how long it would take to build a robot out of metal parts, as Monomi had been built out of computer code, and her classmates were really very busy. If she finished rebuilding the simulation before the robot was finished, then her friends could come to her. It was a comforting thought.

She also didn’t want to leave Jabberwock Island in order to make it easier for Hinata to find her again, to maximize the time that they spent together. It wasn’t just that she was lonely, though she was, or that she wanted to know who he was now that Hinata had merged his two personalities together, though she did, but simply that she wanted to spend the most amount of time with him possible.

Chiaki wasn’t very good at dating simulations, but she had played enough of them to recognize that this was usually the point where the heroine realized that she was in love with someone. Unfortunately, shortly after this realization Chiaki would accidentally choose all the wrong options and end up with a game over. If only she had progressed enough in the dating simulations she had played to know what she should do next in order to stay on the route.

She was at the farm wondering what she should do about the cow, when Hinata’s avatar finally became active once again. He frowned at the cow, the farm, and Chiaki, before saying mildly, “Do you believe me _now_ that milk comes from cows?’

“I’m not sure,” Chiaki said thoughtfully. “You said that it came from cows, and I don’t think you’re wrong … but it really does make more sense that if you cut a milk bottle in half, a cow will come out.” That was, after all, what the games she had played had taught her.

“I swear, it really doesn’t,” Hinata sighed. “I promise you, milk comes from cows, and cows do not come from milk.”

“I know, even if that doesn’t make sense.” She frowned. “Is it true that we need to milk cows? Do we need to milk this cow?”

“I … don’t think so?” Hinata said, though he didn’t sound particularly confident about it. “We never had to when we were here in the Neo World Program. I mean we can, if you want, but I don’t think it’ll get sick or anything. It’s not really a cow.”

“Hmm,” Chiaki said. “I think it’s a cow if it thinks it’s a cow. Maybe I’ll milk it later.”

“Yeah, maybe. Though I don’t think it’s alive like you are.” He looked away. “Anyway, I thought you should know that I’m making progress on the robot. I think I’ve got enough data now that you’ll be able to feel things like all the other girls.”

“Really?” Chiaki clasped her hands together in excitement. “That’d be nice. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be another girl.”

“Uh … that’s not really what I meant…” Hinata trailed off, swallowing nervously. “I came in here for another reason though. I’m up to building it now and I wanted to know … do you know what you want to look like now?”

Chiaki blinked, wondering whether she had momentarily gone offline and missed a brief part of the conversation that would explain what Hinata meant. “What … do I want to look like … now?” she echoed blankly.

“Well, you know. The way you look now, that’s how we remembered the Nanami Chiaki that went to Hope’s Peak. We all look older now, so if you wanted to, you could look older too.”

Chiaki looked up at the Hinata’s two-colored eyes, the subtly different planes of his face, and thought she might understand. All of her friends had grown up into young adults, with the physical appearance to match. The Nanami Chiaki that they had known at school never got that opportunity, and was always going to be seventeen years old in their memories. Maybe, through Chiaki, the human Nanami Chiaki would get to grow up. She hummed the field theme for Ys I as she thought about it. “I don’t mind looking like I do now,” she said finally, “but it would be interesting to look a little older too.”

“Okay,” Hinata said, nodding. “Do you have any ideas of what you want to look like? I know the request is a bit out of nowhere, but …”

Chiaki hummed as she created a sketchpad and crayons, and then began to draw. She drew a pink circle for her face and a salmon triangle for her body, with two salmon stick arms and pink stick legs poking out of the triangle. She drew a smiley face on the circle with red crayon, and after switching to a pink crayon drew her hair in short swoops of color. It looked about right, she thought, and handed it to Hinata. “This is what I think I would look like.”

Hinata accepted the sketch pad and looked at the diagram, a perplexed frown creasing his forehead. “I’m not sure what I expected,” he muttered to himself, Then, louder, he suggested, “How about I draw what I think you could look like, and then you tell me if I have it right?”

“Okay,” Chiaki agreed readily, curious to see what Hinata thought she would look like in her early twenties. She extended the crayon packet to him and was surprised when he extracted a black one. He flipped to the next clean page on the sketchpad and started drawing, holding the book slightly too high for Chiaki to see it clearly. She got up on her toes to see better, and he angled the sketchpad so that she couldn’t see then either. “Hinata-kun,” she protested, cheeks puffing out in indignation.

“You can see it when I’m done,” Hinata said absently, his hand now moving fluidly across the page.

Finally, he turned the sketch book around to show her what he had drawn. The sketch, all in black, looked a lot like her. The woman in the picture wore the hoodie that Chiaki wore, her backpack slung low on her back, and her outfit was like the school uniform she wore now. There were subtle differences, however: her hair was worn slightly longer with two barrettes holding her hair from her face, her face looked slightly different with the residual baby fat shaved away, and the way she held her head was more direct than Chiaki’s usual. Her eyes were the same, as was her smile. It was recognizably her, but a her that had grown older, had experienced the same things as the rest of their classmates and wore those experiences on her face. The more she looked at it, the more Chiaki liked it.

“That’s how you think I could look?” she asked in wonder.

“Yeah,” Hinata said, sounding relieved. “It’s not too different, not like how Saionji grew up. It’s still you, it’s just … you know, an older you.”

It was a version of her that Chiaki had never been before. It was a version of her that would belong with her now-adult classmates, a version of her that looked like she would succeed in helping her friends create a new future for everyone. “I think it’s perfect,” she said, and was rewarded by Hinata’s smile.

“Good. I’m glad you liked it.” He swallowed now, blushing, and Chiaki wasn’t quite sure why. “I’ve uh, spent a lot of time trying to think about what you might have looked like.”

“You did?”

“Uh … yeah.” If he had been embarrassed before, he was more so now. Chiaki looked at him, baffled, which didn’t seem to help his blush or encourage him to give an explanation.

“I’m glad,” she said. “I’m really looking forward to seeing what it looks like. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Actually, yeah, there is something you can do,” Hinata said. “Could you record yourself making faces?”

“What kind of faces?”

“All kinds. The more the better. Oh, and there’s a few drivers for motion that I’ll be finalizing when I get a moment too — I’ll send them to you for alpha testing, if you get time.”

“Don’t worry,” Chiaki said. “I have lots of time. The quicker everything works, the quicker I can talk with everyone, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.” He looked down at his watch, which was flashing repeatedly at him. “Oh. I have to go. I guess Naegi is trying to call me. I’ll see you soon.”

“I’ll be here,” Chiaki promised.

* * *

 

Time was a slippery thing, Chiaki was learning. When she had been living in the simulation with her friends, there had never been enough of it — not enough time to get to know what made her classmates happy or sad, not enough time to apply what she had learned to stop the murders, not enough time to sit down and knit her classmates together into something stronger using video games. Now that the Neo World Program was over, her classmates were awake, and she had fulfilled her purpose as the guiding AI, she had far too much time and was all the more conscious of it. It was, she thought, a very human thing to be impatient.

After their latest date — if that was what it was, and Chiaki was not quite sure — Hinata had not logged into the simulation for the last few days. She was able to tell, through the stream of data that passed through the server from one terminal to another, that all of her classmates were well, that there were secret communications between Hinata, Togami, and Naegi about the Future Foundation’s plans in terms of rehabilitating the world, that her classmates travelled the world and undid their mistakes by rebuilding what they had torn down.

She knew that they were all right, but she yearned to see that they were all right, and to be a part of their all right.

She knew that Hinata would keep his promises. If he was building her a robot body to use so that she could interact with the others in the real world, then he would build it. It was the waiting that was frustrating, because she wanted to be involved _now_.

It was, therefore, ironic how surprising it was when she finally received a request to synchronize to a device called NanamiChiakiv3.

“That’s not a very creative name,” Chiaki commented aloud. “I’ll have to think of something else later.” She accepted the request and closed her eyes for transfer.

When she opened them again, everything was _different_. She was in a work shed, the light artificial and white-bright to her eyes, and the metallic tang of oil and metal stung her nose even over the slightly stuffy air of the work shed. She noted, with some baffled bemusement, that a copy of the illustration she had given Hinata in the simulation was pinned up on the wall. Hinata himself was standing nearby, his hands half extended towards her. He was slightly shorter than she remembered him being, until she remembered that they had decided to make her robot body a little taller than her avatar’s height. Superficially everything looked like it had in the simulation in terms of colors, shapes and depth. It was when she tried to look deeper to see the source code of her surroundings that she was unable to see anything at all.

“Did it work?” Hinata asked, and it was unclear whether he was asking the question of her or himself. He was looking at her, hope and dread warring on his face. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” Chiaki began, and then stopped in surprise. Her voice sounded strange, a little deeper and older than she remembered it, but she would get used to it in time. She smiled at the awe dawning on Hinata’s face, and it was that awe that made her daring. “It’s nice to see you, Hajime-kun.”

She still wasn’t good at dating sims, still didn’t quite understand how to properly commit to a particular romantic route, but Hinata’s startled pleasure was a sign that she was on the right path by using his first name. “You too, Chiaki,” he replied, and then laughed as a blush spread up his neck and cheeks. “We can finally play video games for real.”

“That’s why you were so insistent that we play games before, right? So that you could see how I play games?” It was wonderful to think that Hinata too thought that this was an important part of her to get right. Chiaki would have sacrificed being able to play games as well as she could have in the past if it meant that she could interact with her friends, but it was better that she didn’t have to.

“Yeah …” Hinata rubbed the back of his head, his mouth quirked into a wry smile. “I figured it was really important that I got that part of you _right_ , you know?”

“Thank you,” Chiaki said, pressing her hand against the left side of her chest. “Now I can play games with everyone.”

The two of them looked at one another for a fraught moment. Chiaki wasn’t sure what to say to break the silence.

Hinata broke it first.

“Sorry it took me so long to finish,” he said, stumbling over his words. “It took longer than I expected to give you facial expressions — it’d be kind of creepy for you if you couldn’t smile or cry. I didn’t mean to make you wait so long for it.”

“It’s okay,” Chiaki said. “I didn’t mind waiting.” She smiled at him. “This is really amazing, did you know? I always knew that you could do amazing things, and I’m sure that the other me, the one that existed before, thought the same as well.” Chiaki would never know for sure, given that her memories of her past self were those reflected to her by her friends, but given how Hinata remembered her predecessor, she was sure that she did.

“I know,” Hinata said quietly. “It took me a while to understand that, but I do, thanks to you and Yukizome-sensei.”

“That’s the important part.”

She was about to say more when the intercom mounted on the wall crackled to life. Chiaki jumped, memories of Monokuma taunting them still fresh in her mind. Hinata looked back at it, looking exasperated, before reaching across to hit the button for the speaker by his hand.

“Yes, what is it?” he said.

“Is everything all right, Hinata-kun?” Sonia sounded concerned, even through the subtle distortion of the speakers. “You’ve been inside there for an awfully long time…”

“Just give me a minute!” he said back, and then put the speaker on mute for a moment. He looked sidelong at Chiaki, eyebrows raised. “Are you ready to meet the others again?”

Chiaki nodded, and Hinata turned the speaker back on. “Hello, Sonia-san,” Chiaki said. There was a gasp on the other end of the intercom. “It’s me. I’m back.”

“Nanami-san? Is that really you?” Sonia asked rapidly

“It’s me. Hinata-kun —” and Hinata looked vaguely crestfallen at this use of his name — “built me a body so that I could interact with you all.”

“Oh! We had wondered what he was doing in there for so long. Please stay right where you are until I bring the others! We have so much to tell you!” The intercom switched off.

“We do, you know,” Hinata said ruefully. “You probably already know it, but we’ve been working on trying to fix up some more of our mistakes. We’re actually about to head out to try and fix up a place just now — that’s probably why Sonia was asking after me. I _have_ been working on this for a while.” He looked across at her. “Did you want to join us? There’ll be plenty of time to fill you in on everything.”

“I’d love to,” and she took his hand in hers. Holding his hand felt strange, not quite like it had in the times she had done it in the simulation, but she didn’t mind it either. The changes were proof that they had continued to strive forward to the future. She nodded at the Gala Omega hairpin he now wore on his tie. “I’m glad you kept that.”

“Me too,” he said. “It’s a reminder.”

“A reminder of what?”

“To always keep moving forward. It’s what both of you would want.” He pushed open the door for the workshop, letting the midday sun stream in.

Chiaki seized the moment by grabbing Hinata’s hand and pulling him forward as she walked out. He stumbled, protesting half-heartedly, while laughing as well.

“Come on, Hajime-kun,” she urged, using her additional weight to move him along. “Let’s go see the others. We’ve got a future to claim, together.”


End file.
